Childhood hunger fight demands a broad brush, expert says

John Cook is out to inoculate kids and their families against hunger. He says it has a contagious habit.

"I want you to understand that hunger is a vital sign," said Cook, who sees the condition as a barometer of health no less significant than any other medical marker.

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An associate professor of pediatrics at Boston University and an expert on the links among well-being, economic power and public health, Cook served as keynote speaker and panelist at a recent symposium at Central DuPage Hospital that was hosted by Loaves & Fishes Community Services in Naperville.

Cook focused his remarks on children who come from households that struggle with food insecurity, the term used for the uncertainty of a consistent source of nourishment for an individual or family.

"At Loaves & Fishes, this part of the population in DuPage County is at the heart of our mission," said Megan Selck, Loaves & Fishes' president and CEO.

While the percentage of low-income households in DuPage remains in the single digits, the proportion of schoolchildren in the Naperville area who live in poverty is significantly higher. More than 18 out of every 100 kids in Indian Prairie School District 204 schools and 13.4 percent of Naperville District 203 students live in low-income households, according to figures published by the Illinois State Board of Education. Seventy-two percent of the families served by Loaves & Fishes' grocery services have children at 18 and younger.

The causes of local need include the lingering effects of the most recent economic recession, with combined trends of higher prices, lower incomes and an increase in "discouraged workers," the phrase Cook uses for those who have stopped trying to find jobs after extended effort.

"Never in the history of this country have we had trends of economic decline over such a long period of time," he said. "The results are very predictable: you see (families) coming into Loaves & Fishes."

They join families who face more mutually exacerbating factors that persist in keeping them unable to meet their families' basic needs. The high costs of housing and medical care — which runs an average of $11,000 for pediatric admissions to treat non-newborn patients, Cook said — are particularly challenging for low-income families. They also are more vulnerable to damage from depression during pregnancy and less likely to secure the prenatal care needed to give babies their best start. The factors that often accompany those circumstances, such as domestic violence and other forms of crime, can also generate a great deal of damaging stress for kids as they grow.

"Toxic stress is really bad in young children, because it can impact and harm the developing brain architecture," Cook said.

Those circumstances, and the people most at risk of being harmed by them, lead eventually to lack of job readiness as a result of inadequate education, and reliance on social services — and they often remain "invisible" because pediatricians and community health specialists are the only ones who see them. Cook said policy makers often don't know they're there, until researchers shed light on them.

He and others who study hunger see those interwoven variables contributing to and perpetuating the sort of intergenerational poverty that can be difficult to escape. The solution, they say, includes economic empowerment of the sort Loaves & Fishes has done in recent years, assembling a network of programs and services that help families break the cycle.

Taking on that challenge, however, involves a broad approach that entails not just budgeting help, job search assistance and enhanced access to health services, but also expanding the availability of a healthy food supply, fostering hometown pride, encouraging policies that place greater value on physical and emotional health, and promoting infrastructure that supports those crucial cornerstones of a well-functioning community.

Cook said the importance of social infrastructure - such as human services and public safety - also must not be underestimated.

"They are as important as physical infrastructures, if not more important," he said, noting that the dysfunction that in recent years has plagued the nation's system of representative democracy "regrettably" has hindered the provision of those building blocks. "They are important for the whole community, whether we use them or not."

One child's inability to thrive affects the kids around him or her, Cook's work has suggested, in part because the additional need draws educators' energy away from the main student population. That's one of the reasons he sees the multifaceted approach as the most promising strategy for approximating an anti-hunger vaccine.

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"Vaccines are really good investments, because they provide protections," Cook said.

It's a plan that makes sense to Sandy Goldberg, a clinical nutritionist and cancer activist who moderated the symposium's panel discussion. She said hurdles to the provision of care are particularly daunting for underserved populations.

"I now have food-secure grandchildren, and seeing those statistics is just very heartbreaking," Goldberg said.

Matt Chicola, Loaves & Fishes' director of external relations, said the Naperville nonprofit's work has expanded recently to add emphasis to its younger clients, from infant care to school nutrition to increasing the flow of protein-rich milk and eggs to local families with kids up to age 18 who need them.

More than 70 percent of the client households served by Loaves & Fishes have at least one family member working a full-time job, he said. Often that's not enough in DuPage County, where a worker earning minimum wage must work 95 hours per week to afford a two-bedroom apartment.

"We're really trying to tackle childhood hunger," Chicola said. "Because we see it every day."